Whale, Dolphins and a giant mystery shadow

Today we started the morning with some wavy conditions and we took a nice and fresh shower during this trip 🙂 that was no problem, because when seeing a huge whale and plenty of dolphins, the salty water gets easily forgotten! First we encountered a big pod of Atlantic spotted dolphins that were very active and performing their shows between the waves. They always get crazy when its wavy and they seem to appreciate the extra waves that our boat creates, to do speed competitions between them and the boat 😉

Soon we got notice of a Sei whale in the area, again! It took a while before we finally found it, because they are super fast swimmers, and especially between the waves it can be hard to find them. Then, the whale rised to the surface! It blowed several times, went down for a short dive, and repeated that over and over again.

Suddenly there was a giant light green/white shadow appearing in the middle of our boats. We thought it was another whale (that is what a shadow usually is) but we waited for a while – saw the shadow moving around – but never coming up. What was that? It will remain a mystery, but surely very weird. Possibly it could have been a whale shark, some kind of dirt mark, whale pee or a strangely shaped ball of fish. Well, after a while we left the weird shadow and went back to our beloved Atlantic spotted dolphins 🙂

In the afternoon the spotted dolphins were already far to the West, but we found a nice group of Risso’s dolphins which was surfacing the waves back and forth. In the group there was also a little black calf 🙂 We also unexpectedly spot a dead rat floating on the ocean surface, definitely not an usual sighting! It was floating next to some debris, likely coming from land runoff due to the past winds and rain.

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About
Stephanie Almeida

Stephanie is Guide at TERRA AZUL since 2013 and Operations Assistant since 2017. Contributed for several years on Data collection for MONICET – The Azores Islands Cetaceans Research & Conservation long-term monitoring project.